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The Brief and Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao is a vibrant, fast-talking,
slang-tossing, generation-spanning, name-dropping,
foot-noted ride, filled with obscure references both
high and low brow, multiple narrators, a good dose
of Spanish, and a wildly complex and convoluted
historical backdrop. And if that description made
you wince and cross this book off your list, let me
first tell you this: it's also a lot of fun. I
didn't expect to like it, didn’t even really want to
read it. But ten pages into the first chapter, I was
bitten. Absolutely enthralled, I signed on for the
rest of the ride. Unlike some other writers that
might be lumped into the same stylistic category,
Junot Diaz is inclusive, not exclusive. He wants you
to join him, wants you to jump in and get on the
dance floor. And he leads like the best partner –
all of a sudden you feel like you've been dancing
the tango for years, even though you just learned
how to foxtrot last week. Confident and brilliant
but never smug, the main narrator of Brief and
Wondrous is so immediately likable, and the
affection he has for the characters in his story so
contagious, that you instantly fall in love with all
of them. Which makes the few small lulls and dips in
the story completely forgivable.

The story begins with Oscar, a lumpy, sad sack,
"alternative genre" obsessed geek with a sweet heart
who falls in love instantly and deeply over and over
again, always unrequited. Nobody gets him, his
smart, bookish ways and sci-fi inclinations make him
ideal fodder for brutal teasing and bullying in
1980's/90's New Jersey. Luckily, we get on
his side from page one. Which makes it difficult
when he disappears from center stage halfway into
the book as the story switches the spotlight onto
his sister, then his mother. Their stories are
fascinating, too – plot-wise even more so – and
their characters are strong-willed and wily, but
it's hard not to miss Oscar, catching glimpses of
his gloomy countenance in the background. Luckily,
the story of Oscar's mother, Hypatía Belicia Cabral
(Beli), roars in like a lion, immersing the reader
in the personal and political history that shapes
the lives of her future children.

Before there was an
American Story, before Paterson spread before Oscar
and Lola like a dream, or the trumpets from the
Island of our eviction had even sounded, there was
their mother, Hypatía Belicia Cabral: a girl so tall
your leg bones ached just looking at her, so dark it
was as if the Creatrix had, in her making, blinked
who, like her yet-to-be-born daughter, would come to
exhibit a particularly Jersey malaise – the
inextinguishable longing for elsewheres.

And a few pages later:

Beli had the inchoate
longings of nearly every adolescent escapist, of an
entire generation, but I ask you: So fucking what?
No amount of wishful thinking was changing the cold
hard fact that she was a teenage girl living in the
Dominican Republic of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo
Molina, the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated.

As we flip back and forth, character
to character, narrator to narrator, Diaz's
prose-dance continues to dazzle as the story takes
on greater weight as the history piles on – but it's
not just dazzling for the sake of the dazzle. He
loves the performance, but not for the applause. He
loves doing it, loves the writing, loves the
rush and the game, and most of all the promise, the
hope, the bet, that you, the reader, will fall in
love, too.

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